Woodcut

The technique of making a print from a block of wood sawn along
the grain (the term is also applied to the print so made).
It is the oldest technique for making prints and its principles
are very simple. The design is drawn on a smooth block of wood
(almost any wood of medium softness can be used) and the parts
that are to be white in the print are cut away with knives
and gouges, leaving the design standing up in relief. This is
then inked and pressed against against a sheet of paper.

The origins of woodcut are obscure (the principle was employed
in fabric printing in the Middle East at least as early as the
5th century AD), but woodcut as we know it appeared in Europe
in the early 15th century; the earliest dated print is perhaps
the St Christopher (1423) by an unknown artist
in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. It was much used as
an illustrative technique in the early days of printed books,
but in the 16th century it lost ground to
line engraving,
which could produce much subtler effects.

In the late 19th
and early 20th century, however, there was a major revival
of interest in the woodcut as a medium of original artistic
expression, artists such as
Munch,
Gauguin and the German
Expressionists
realizing the potential of the rugged boldness that is characteristic
of the technique. The coloured woodcut, using different blocks
for each colour, was particularly popular in Japan.